Mystery members, trees with no birds… and a queue for John Daly at Hooters. Augusta is marvellous, fun - and very weird

John Daly is back in Augusta and the local Hooters is happy to have him. We know that because a sign outside their restaurant on Washington Road, around a mile from a very different kind of establishment, carries a message: Meet John Daly Here All Week. And that is precisely what folk do, queuing around the bend until they meet their puffing, chugging master of chaos.

But he seemed a little less welcome a year ago. A few of us had gone to make the annual inquiries around golf’s wildest thing and he was nowhere to be seen at the spot he frequented for 26 years.

The table where he sells his autographs and gear was gone. The motorhome in the parking lot was gone. His packs of Marlboros, his diet cokes, all gone. So what happened? What had driven away the 57-year-old winner of two majors, whose presence on this strip had become every bit as familiar as the monuments to artifice down the road?

Well, there was an answer of sorts to that from a waitress. ‘Unchoicely behaviour,’ she said, and those two words joined with a few others to invite a range of curiosities.

The mind boggles, but then you get a bit of that around here, in this enclave of weird and wonderful contradictions and sensory contortions.

It’s a place where you find the world’s most exclusive golf club and one in five of the wider population live in poverty. A place where a black golfer has been its biggest draw for almost 30 years and where the first black member was only accepted in 1990.

A place where Tiger Woods on one leg can waltz into the weekend and a peak-fitness Rory McIlroy can do a life-and-death tango with the cut. A place where some legends of this game swing in ceremony to open the Masters and a different kind of star was temporarily barred from Hooters.

Those thoughts can clatter awkwardly around your mind, like a McIlroy drive bouncing from branch to branch along the perfectly ordered rows of pines. You can love it, like I very much do, but you can also catch yourself asking a question: where the bloody hell are the squirrels and birds?

That one has become a strange fixation in my mind in the past week, just as it did this time last year. One of the lovely buggy drivers, who ferry media from the most opulent press centre in sport to its golf’s manicured playground, because they do not wish for us to walk behind the scenes, or maybe they just do not want us to, claims she saw one on Tuesday. She’s been doing that gig for a few years and wonders the same question as me. ‘I didn’t see any squirrels last year but they are pretty strict about having a credential,’ she said, and that was fun.

It's all fun. The sport is fun, the sense of history around golf’s youngest major is fun, the setting is beautifully fun. The quaint white clubhouse is fun, and astonishingly we as journalists can go in there, if you’ll indulge some shop talk.

A few colleagues with more tours of privilege than me regularly wonder if one day that particular privilege will be revoked. If the green jackets will eventually say no and bring the shutters down, as has become the norm in so many sports. But that hasn’t happened yet.

And so you walk in, go by the open fire place on the right, where a former reporter a few years ago had a snooze, and up the narrow staircase on the left, where I once passed Jack Nicklaus on my way to the surprisingly small room where they held the Champions Dinner on Tuesday and always. That’s how you get to the balcony and the best view in town. On Friday, I had a coffee up there and watched the politest form of bedlam below as Woods stepped out of the same front door and went to the first tee. Again, a privilege.

To my left this time last year was Sir Nick Faldo; to my left on Friday was one of the older members, a business-looking sort, but you think twice about striking a conversation with some of those august chaps of Augusta National. That might be the invasion that breaks the arrangement. That might be the trigger for the drawbridge.

Because here’s the thing about the clubhouse – it has an open door and a closed one at the same time. You can come in but you will not take too much out. They won’t tell us who is among their 300 or so members, but we know it includes Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. And we know of at least one former US president in their history in Dwight D Eisenhower. Just as we know one sticking point in the trivial business of golf tour mergers is that Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of the Saudi wealth fund, and a man for whom heads of state will clear a schedule, has not yet made it in.

We also know that they probably didn’t want us to know too much about last year’s falling trees that nearly hit some patrons. Or to know where the squirrels go. Or to know how much green paint is used to correct the blemishes. Or to discuss the suggestion that hidden speakers play simulations of bird song in the trees. Or to explain why some get the clearance from a green jacket (via a system a few have assumed involves some kind of identifying device and our passes) to ask questions in a press conference and others do not. On that, at least half a dozen wanted to enquire about Woods’s recent meeting over golf with Al-Rumayyan, and all that contentious LIV merger business, and curiously none made it through.

Small beans, really, in a place where the utopia is ever so well preserved. In a place that can provoke a thought that it exists under a glorious dome painted in the colours of a perfect blue sky and occasionally introduces a gale for kicks. A place where you would far rather be in than out.

And that’s because it is all marvellously fun. But would it be a form of unchoicely behaviour to ask why wonderful can also feel a little weird?

Let Woods crack on

There were many who wanted to see Tiger Woods retire when he limped out of the Masters seven holes into his third round last year. 

We hear the same argument around Andy Murray and might soon entertain similar in the direction of Ronnie O’Sullivan if the world championships don’t go his way next week. 

It’s the selfishness that comes from a good place and our desire to preserve heroes in a state closer to their greater form. It’s also nonsense and self-defeating – watching Woods use brain over diminished brawn to make the cut this week was every bit as uplifting as some of his finest wins on two good legs. Let them crack on.

Kane and Haaland should both be treasured

Harry Kane scored his 39th goal of the season for Bayern Munich against Arsenal in midweek. 

Erling Haaland, meanwhile, drew a blank for the fourth time in five games, which has been drummed into a minor drama that overlooks he had 21 in the previous 20. 

Kane is a better all-round player; Haaland is shaping into one of the greatest sporting killers of all time and is giving peace a brief chance. 

Using one to knock the other feels an awful lot like a distraction when you could just sit back and treasure watching them both.